How does the foreign aid of Germany support other countries? The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) releases no details, although about 6 billion euros is made available for aid every year. Now the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany has broken down the data – with the unintended help of the OECD.

For two days Christian Kreutz wrangled with the data sets, then he presented his first results on a new open-data map. More than half the ODA payments come from the BMZ, the rest come from other ministries. Kreutz concludes: “Hardly any country receives nothing.”

Surprising findings

Interestingly, not only classic developing countries are supported. The lion’s share goes to BRIC countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China which have profited from high economic growth for years.

Russia received around 12 billion euros in the years 1995 to 2009, China and India around 6 and 4 billion euros respectively.

Current sites of conflict receive quite a lot of money: Iraq received 7 billion euros, with the majority coming from debt cancellation. A similar situation is found in Nigeria and Cameroon.

In comparison Afghanistan and Pakistan receive only about 1.2 billion euros.

Even authoritarian regimes benefit from German development aid: Syria received around 1 billion euros. A large proportion of the money is spent on debt relief as well as water and education projects.

Interestingly, however, some European states received more money: Poland got 2.8 billion, mainly going into the education sector.

EU aspirants Serbia and Turkey received 2 billion euros each.

Payment information was also combined with data from the Economist on democratic development. Here a kind of rule of thumb can be recognised: countries which are less democratic are encouraged.

Egypt, for example, not only received support for water projects and its textile industry, but also for its border police – by an unspecified federal ministry.

BMZ is opening up

The new aid data map does not break down numbers by donors yet. But it could do so, as the detailed OECD data supports it.

Christian Kreutz has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the BMZ to get further data. But the ministry is already showing signs of movement: a spokesperson said that project funding data will be published soon on the ministry’s website.

The interesting question is how open and accessible the BMZ data will be. Recipients of ODA funds can not be inferred directly from the OECD database. Open data activists hope that the BMZ will not hide the data behind a restrictive search interface to prevent further analysis, à la Farmsubsidy.